Skæring Bæk

The project is centered around and highlights the site’s existing qualities through a clear main approach that is based on the theme of the assignment – ‘community’, ‘nature’ and context ‘.

Three connections form, together with three landscape qualities, a main approach that distributes the development around an identity-creating community, and reinforces the character of the area as a place between City and Country.

The project will strengthen daily contact between the residents by creating different meeting places, differentiated levels of publicness, places for both activity and contemplation. The project intends to shape a sense of community on multiple scales: the neighbor, the residence, the house rows towards the courtyard, the unifying street, and beyond their extent, the surrounding buildings and the local area of Skæring.

There are increasingly more lonely people, not understood as living alone, but people who have reduced quality of life, both physically and mentally, due to lack of contact with other people. What is missing is not necessarily close friends, but the daily contact that confirms that you belong to a community. In the report, “The National Health Profile 2017”, 6.3 percent of the respondents say that they often feel “undesirable alone”.

Three house rows form a neighborhood of approx. 30 units each, further embracing three different landscape characters belonging to the site. To the south, the meandering Skæring Bæk defines a ‘river landscape ‘; to the east, the rainwater basin forms a ‘lake landscape’; and to the northwest, the ‘cultural landscape’, or, the productive landscape, is created in extension of the agricultural fields in the west and the plant center to the north.